EU signs ACTA, global internet censorship treaty
Rady Ananda
Today, the European Union and 22 member states signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced. They have now joined the US and seven other nations that signed the treaty last October.
This signing ceremony merely formalized the EU’s adoption of ACTA last month, during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries, reports TechDirt.
Though initiated by the US, Japan is the official depository of the treaty.
Removal of the Three Strikes clause, in which users accused of three counts of piracy would be barred from the internet, paved the way for the EU to adopt ACTA last month.
Related to ACTA, a chapter in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) “would have state signatories adopt even more restrictive copyright measures than ACTA,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Both ACTA and TPP were developed without public input and outside international trade groups, like the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Leaked cables published by WikiLeaks in 2009 exposed early drafts of ACTA, resulting in a firestorm of controversy. Those cables, coupled with later releases, showed that ACTA negotiationsbegan in 2006
and were controversial even to participating states. An historical
summary of the treaty’s progress through December can be found here.
Today, the European Union and 22 member states signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced. They have now joined the US and seven other nations that signed the treaty last October.
This signing ceremony merely formalized the EU’s adoption of ACTA last month, during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries, reports TechDirt.
Though initiated by the US, Japan is the official depository of the treaty.
Removal of the Three Strikes clause, in which users accused of three counts of piracy would be barred from the internet, paved the way for the EU to adopt ACTA last month.
Related to ACTA, a chapter in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) “would have state signatories adopt even more restrictive copyright measures than ACTA,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Both ACTA and TPP were developed without public input and outside international trade groups, like the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Speaking Perpetually To The Political Wind: Why Obama’s Words Lack Authority
“Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top.” – Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind.
“No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently-
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free-
Up domes- up spires- up kingly halls-
Up fanes- up Babylon-like walls-
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers-
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.” – Edgar Allan Poe, The City in the Sea (1831).
“John Murdoch: Excuse me. How do I get to the end of the line?
Train Passenger: You want the Express.
John Murdoch: [after train blows by him] Hey, how come that train didn’t stop?
Station Master: That’s the Express.” - Dark City, Directed by Alex Proyas (1998).
“A man made of stone has nothing to say.” – Kno, If You Cry f. Natti, from the album Death Is Silent (2010).
Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA
White House bypasses Senate to ink agreement that could allow Chinese companies to demand ISPs remove web content in US with no legal oversight
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Paul
Joseph Watson
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Months before the debate about Internet
censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users,
President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies
in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web
content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.
Civilian Personnel: The Missing Piece in the Pentagon’s Budget Puzzle
by
While most news stories have accurately characterized the Obama administration’s proposed military spending cuts as “modest,” the Pentagon is planning significant reductions in the number of active-duty troops in the Army and Marine Corps. Both forces will be larger than they were in 2001, but the active-duty Army will fall from a post-9/11 high of 570,000 in 2010 to 490,000. The Marine Corps will go from 202,000 to 182,000.
The DoD should likewise reduce civilian personnel.
The reason the Pentagon’s plan places so much emphasis on personnel is stated clearly in the document (pdf):
While most news stories have accurately characterized the Obama administration’s proposed military spending cuts as “modest,” the Pentagon is planning significant reductions in the number of active-duty troops in the Army and Marine Corps. Both forces will be larger than they were in 2001, but the active-duty Army will fall from a post-9/11 high of 570,000 in 2010 to 490,000. The Marine Corps will go from 202,000 to 182,000.
The DoD should likewise reduce civilian personnel.
The reason the Pentagon’s plan places so much emphasis on personnel is stated clearly in the document (pdf):
Military personnel costs have doubled since 2001, or about 40% above inflation, while the number of full-time military personnel, including activated reserves, increased by only 8% during the same time period.
Ten Red Lines Washington’s Totalitarian Terrorist State Has Crossed
Saman Mohammadi
The government in Washington is a failed terrorist state. It can no longer manage American public opinion, its violations of international law are resented by many nations, and it has failed to psychologically dominate the world by unleashing terror at home and abroad.
To put it simply, nations are not afraid of America because it has military strength combined with political vision, rather, they are afraid because America’s leaders are insane and self-destructive. In other words, they are afraid of a failed terrorist state, not a global superpower.
The government in Washington is a failed terrorist state. It can no longer manage American public opinion, its violations of international law are resented by many nations, and it has failed to psychologically dominate the world by unleashing terror at home and abroad.
To put it simply, nations are not afraid of America because it has military strength combined with political vision, rather, they are afraid because America’s leaders are insane and self-destructive. In other words, they are afraid of a failed terrorist state, not a global superpower.
Zambada Niebla Case Exposes US Drug War Quid Pro Quo
Posted by Bill Conroy -
Prosecutor, DEA Agent Confirm Intel From Sinaloa Mafia Used to Undermine Juarez, Beltran Leyva Drug Organizations
U.S. government officials have long presented the drug war through the media as a type of "Dirty Harry” movie, in which hardscrabble cops are engaged in a pitched battle with hardened street criminals who threaten the very social fabric of life behind America’s gated communities.
Of course it’s a big pretense, with the truth being closer to what really goes on in the marketplace of the US everyday. The drug war is, in reality, a drug business in which backroom deals are cut to advance the profit motives of the business entities involved, whether they be narco-trafficking organizations, or weapons manufacturers or government bureaucracies — and the aspiring, greedy careerists who inhabit their leadership ranks.
But even the US government makes mistakes, and in this case it’s the government’s own agents and prosecutors who have that egg on their face via affidavits filed in early December in a controversial criminal case now pending in the Windy City. The pleadings supposedly advance the government’s case against a major Mexican narco-trafficker, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla. In reality, though — for any person of a critical mind reading them — the court documents demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.
Nowhere has the peel on that sour fruit been stripped back more cleanly with the paring knife of truth, revealing the bloody pulp inside, than in the ongoing narco-trafficking case against the rising Mexican Sinaloa Cartel capo Zambada Niebla — son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, who, together with business associate Joaquin Guzman Loera (El Chapo), serves as a godfather of the Sinaloa organization.
Prosecutor, DEA Agent Confirm Intel From Sinaloa Mafia Used to Undermine Juarez, Beltran Leyva Drug Organizations
U.S. government officials have long presented the drug war through the media as a type of "Dirty Harry” movie, in which hardscrabble cops are engaged in a pitched battle with hardened street criminals who threaten the very social fabric of life behind America’s gated communities.
Of course it’s a big pretense, with the truth being closer to what really goes on in the marketplace of the US everyday. The drug war is, in reality, a drug business in which backroom deals are cut to advance the profit motives of the business entities involved, whether they be narco-trafficking organizations, or weapons manufacturers or government bureaucracies — and the aspiring, greedy careerists who inhabit their leadership ranks.
But even the US government makes mistakes, and in this case it’s the government’s own agents and prosecutors who have that egg on their face via affidavits filed in early December in a controversial criminal case now pending in the Windy City. The pleadings supposedly advance the government’s case against a major Mexican narco-trafficker, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla. In reality, though — for any person of a critical mind reading them — the court documents demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.
Nowhere has the peel on that sour fruit been stripped back more cleanly with the paring knife of truth, revealing the bloody pulp inside, than in the ongoing narco-trafficking case against the rising Mexican Sinaloa Cartel capo Zambada Niebla — son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, who, together with business associate Joaquin Guzman Loera (El Chapo), serves as a godfather of the Sinaloa organization.
CBS News Poaches Narco News’ Drug War Coverage Posted. by Bill Conroy
Network Producer Also Concedes “Some Bloggers Were Out Ahead of Us” on the Fast and Furious Story But Were Given No Credit
Taking a poke at the
mainstream media is old hat in the new age of dispersed media access,
but the mechanizations of some old-world information clowns are still
worth illuminating from time to time, particularly when they involve
pilfering unapologetically work done by the independent press.
In the spotlight on
that front for this expose is CBS News, part of CBS Corp.’s
“Entertainment business segment,” which accounts for some 53 percent of
the parent company’s annual revenue of $14 billion, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
You would think with
that kind of pecuniary clout, the employees of CBS News would have no
need to lift and repurpose deep reporting unabashedly, without credit,
from independent journalists, who are invariably underpaid — if at all.
But, in this case, and in my experience with many other interactions
with network TV honks, the evidence of such behavior in play seems
rather convincing.
The story in
question relates to arms trafficking between the United States and
Mexico, legal gun running in this case as part of a U.S. State
Department program known as Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) — through
which U.S. companies are approved to sell arms to Mexico, via the
Mexican military. Given the situation in Mexico with the drug war, and
the extent of the corruption within the government there, including its
military, the DCS program appears to be a direct conduit for weapons
transfers that empower narco-trafficking organizations.
At least that’s the
nature of the story that Narco News broke in early 2009, and continued
to follow through this year, with three additional story updates
following the original scoop — which carried the headline “Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be source of Narco Syndicates Rising Firepower.”
In early December of
this year, nearly three years after Narco News published its initial
story on the DCS program, CBS News, via its well-marketed “Investigative
Unit” (which takes credit for exposing the Fast and Furious
Fast and Furious Is One Among Many Similar Drug-War Warts
Turf Wars, Agency Budgets and Case Stats Trump Lives in the Era of Prohibition
Ever since ATF’s Fast and Furious gun-running operation was catapulted into the national spotlight in early 2011, the focus has been on the politics influencing the police work and the manipulations behind intelligence operations, with little to no attention paid to the dysfunction of the drug-war bureaucracy.
A report released by the US Government Accountability Office in June 2009, some three months before Operation Fast and Furious was even launched, underscores that dysfunction in succinct detail. Advance copies of that report were provided at the time to “the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State and to the Office of National Drug Control Policy,” GAO documents state.
In that now two-and-a-half-year-old report is a blistering indictment of operations, obviously already in existence prior to June 2009 and Fast and Furious, that utilized a strategy similar to that employed in Fast and Furious — which allowed criminals to “walk” thousands of guns into Mexico under the watch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (better known as ATF). The supposed goal: identify and bring to justice the higher-ups in Mexico’s arms trafficking organizations.
Here are the money graphs from the GAO report:
Ever since ATF’s Fast and Furious gun-running operation was catapulted into the national spotlight in early 2011, the focus has been on the politics influencing the police work and the manipulations behind intelligence operations, with little to no attention paid to the dysfunction of the drug-war bureaucracy.
A report released by the US Government Accountability Office in June 2009, some three months before Operation Fast and Furious was even launched, underscores that dysfunction in succinct detail. Advance copies of that report were provided at the time to “the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State and to the Office of National Drug Control Policy,” GAO documents state.
In that now two-and-a-half-year-old report is a blistering indictment of operations, obviously already in existence prior to June 2009 and Fast and Furious, that utilized a strategy similar to that employed in Fast and Furious — which allowed criminals to “walk” thousands of guns into Mexico under the watch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (better known as ATF). The supposed goal: identify and bring to justice the higher-ups in Mexico’s arms trafficking organizations.
Here are the money graphs from the GAO report:
Gingrich Took a Month to Rebound, but Here He Is
By Al Giordano
Now that everyone in this electoral projections business is picking former House Speaker Newt Gringich to win a come-from-behind victory in today's South Carolina primary, let's reflect on why they had so little faith until after the polls began turning his way. Less than a week ago, the New York Times' 538 blog projected former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney with an 82 percent chance to win in the Palmetto State and, citing its method of "regression analysis" gave him a 98 percent chance to win the GOP nomination.
Now that everyone in this electoral projections business is picking former House Speaker Newt Gringich to win a come-from-behind victory in today's South Carolina primary, let's reflect on why they had so little faith until after the polls began turning his way. Less than a week ago, the New York Times' 538 blog projected former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney with an 82 percent chance to win in the Palmetto State and, citing its method of "regression analysis" gave him a 98 percent chance to win the GOP nomination.
Nuclear War against Iran. by Michel Chossudovsky
The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages.
Coalition partners, which include the US, Israel and Turkey are in "an advanced stage of readiness".
Various military exercises have been conducted,
starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also
conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December
in anticipation of a US sponsored attack.
Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle
diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in
Brussels.
PREPARING FOR THE NEXT CONQUEST: What does Libya tell us about Intervention in Syria and Iran?. by Richard Lightbown
Debkafile reported on 17 January that an imminent joint Israeli-US exercise had been cancelled by Israel’s prime minister, and not by the US as widely supposed. Convinced that Iran has made the decision to become a nuclear power Mr Netanyahu is preparing for possible unilateral attacks on Iranian nuclear sites.British press reports say agents from the CIA and MI6 are operating within Syria while British and French Special Forces are training members of the Free Syrian Army in Turkey. Pravda has claimed that NATO snipers who fought in Libya have been sent to Syria.
As regional war threatens drastic and unforeseen
consequences in the Middle East some commentators claim that
humanitarian benefits justify Western intervention in repressive states.
This claim is worth considering in the context of the events that have
befallen Libya.
The Greatest Threat
It's not the Mooslims
by Justin Raimondo,
CIA Drug Ops Conspiracy-Unaired Documentary-Full Length
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